Retrogamer Revival: Good or Bad?

Playing: The Melvins - Ozma /Watching: The Big Combo/Reading - Neuromancer - William Gibson

Wow -- this is a terrible title for this blog. I might have to go back and amend it. First off, isn't retrogame or retrogamer and revival kind of redundant? Seciond of the offenses is that these cultural movements aren't necessarily good or bad. They simply are, and if they are more than this, it isn't as simple as "good" or "bad" in any case. Any interpretation of them is just my opinion.

So, is it just a fad? Is it here to stay? I think it is indeed he to stay. All fads are cultural movements, but not all cultural movements are mere fads. Fad implies more transience, and more vacuous nature. These games would be here to stay in some ofrm or another regardless of whether there was interest in them, and the sheer magnitude of their former popularity, coupled with their cute and addictive (ie: "timeless") nature means that long after these old disks, arcade boards, ROM, and cartridges have lost theior battery power making it impossible to save your game or become completely unplayable in a non-digital format, they wqill be revived, in the same way that google, a massive mainstream corporation revamped their logo last week on the Pac-Man's 30th anniversary in the most elaborate (and likely costly) vneture yet, by forming the google logo into a playable Pac-Man maze (I won my my first round!). As gamer Steve Sanders has said of archaic games "These are the games people cared about." We still do.

Pac-Man didn't just become a Saturday Morning Cartoon, along with a host of his contemporaries. He is a cultural icon. My uncle once used the charcter to describe the shape of a surgical tool that was to be used on him to make sense of it to my family. Everyone understood. I rest my case.

Seriously, though, retrogaming is all the rage in the 2000s. Sure X-box 360 and Wii are the kingd of the day when it comes to cutting edge, Son'y monsterously oversized, overpriced PS3 continues to limp along, and Dreamcasts and Playstation 2s sell surprisingy well in a downed economy (online marketplaces repackaging unsold or used dreamcasts with new games as new consoles sell well, and the PS2 continues to sell far better than its successor, the result of a downed economy and the quality of software available). New Dreamcast games are still being made, and the Sega Master System continues to have new games published for it in Brazil. Independent developers such as Milestone, Good Deal Games, 4 Play/Scatologic, G.rev, redspotgames, and many others continue to develope and publish new games for older consoles (likely without the consent, publicity, or support of the system's original developers). Many of these games quickly become collector's items.

In the mainstream, the retro revival can be seen in malls across America, selling derivitaves (either officially supported or pirated international derivitaves) of older systems, often in the popular (but cheap) plug'n'play format (the CTV, or commodore 64 for your television, for example, came packed with over 30 games inside of a joystick that plugs into your monitor, or Atari's "new" systyem, the all-in-one plug'n'play Atari Flashback, fashioned to look like a vintage 2600, or even the seemingly endless array of dual systems such as the Twin Famicom, which plays both NES and SNES games, Genesis and SNES games, or some derivation thereof).

T-shirt are the most visible sign of retrogaming outside of the house. Retro gamer shirt are sold everywhere, just as vintage-looking AC/DC, Saturday morning cartoon, and Marvel and DC comic's shirts, are being bought and sold by kids too young to even remember, muvch less have lived through, these times. Still, it warms my heart to see a T-shirt sporting the Atari logo I remember seeing when I was far too young to have ever held a joystick.

"i am 8-bit" is another outpouring of life-support into the classic gaming format. This is a multi-artist, multimedia teqam of artists who have joined forces in representing their favorite characters of the 8- and 16- bit era of gaming artistically. They have released at least one art-book that I know of, sold in places like Barne's and Noble, and conmtinue to exhibit works all over the place. I once met a couple of the artists and saw their work at an art exhibition at Pergamont Station in L.A. here in CA. Warning: many of these renderings are not for the kiddies. Nevertheless, its fine art format aside, i am 8-bit is a kindred spirit and bastard child of pixel art, which has become popular within the last twenty years in or outside of gaming, and which, in its purest form, uses an isometric perspective like that seem in the very non-pixel oriented The Sims or in arcade games like Viewpoint or computer games like the original Siom City. Created skillfully, often employing tiny pixels themselves to painstakingly render the work with a sometimes surpring detail but a distintly stylized and retro feel, these pieces have given way to an wera of subculture which embraces larger pixels and less detainled artworks representing characters like Donkey Kong, Link, or the guys from Contra in all their pixelated glory. Spritemaking and the modification of in-game graphics, and even from the ground up new derivations of old games (an example being Sonic Chaos Revolution and numerouis Zelda spin-off) continue to thrive in the Homebrew scene, which releases new or modified games indepentendly devloped (thus, homebrew) and released.

Never in my life have I live in an era where I could expect to regularly see a slim, well-rounded girl wearing an Atari or Q*bert T-shirt.

Retro gamnes tv shows abound on the internet, and some have spawned official and not-so-official DVD releases. Classic Game Room, a short-lived, but much loved, early internet show centered around gaming and introducing the sarcasm and brand of humor now found commonly on shows of this format, recently had a DVD release you can find on Amazon wheich celebrated its short but influential existence, and Retrowaretv continues to broadcast reviews, information, news and stories from the basement, literally, of a couple of enthusiastic retro game players. On the show, they also support affiliates, new projects (like working reproductions of retro gaming games that are too pricey for the general public, and From Pixels to Plastic, which reconstructs 3 dimensional (albeit pixelated) scenes from older games. Videogame Take-
Out is another such show. Humorous shows are often less beholden to retrogaming in general, but still feature older games in their shows on a regular basis, although the emphasis is here again on humor. These include The Angry Video Game Nerd and a few other shows in which the percieved, but often very real difficulty of older games, especially bad ones, is exploited for the sake of crude and/or offensive humor, which is the emphasis of said shows.

Retroganming recently rwent "viral" on the internet as well. Stories reviewing new entries in long-running series like Super Mario Bros. (with the distinctly non-retro Super Mario Galaxy 2), the miraculous return to 2d form of Sonic in Sonic the Hedgehog 4, are regularly featured on sites like Yahoo! News (which is really unfortunate, if you ask me). A recent story on Yahoo! reported the historic breaking of the Asteroids high-score. The brilliant \documentary "The King of Kong" has both imporved expusure ofr the long-running Twin Galaxies scorebeaord, which is available online, and has served to heighten public awarness and popularity of cheif Donkey Kong contenders Billy Mitchell and Steve Weibe, who are now virtual celebrities on a wide scale. Phrases combining popular urban clioches and retro gaming like "old-school" and "it's on like Donkey Kong," are the norm among teens, 20, 30, and 40-somethings.

Back to the viral videos, the culmination of all of this (so far) has been a "viral" video that got wide exposure on retrogaming outlets like youtube (and wewas featured as a Yahoo! top story about a month ago) represented the coming to life of the I am 8-bit and From Pixels to Plastic subgenre movements, featured videogame sprites coming to life, becoming 3D pixels, and attacking new York City. The rendering is beautiful and thwe epic in scale video was brilliantly conceived and executed. Both its creation (tyhe video is called "Pixels" and is by artist Patrick Jean) and its popualrity represent a high-water mark (thus far) for the retro gaming movement.

Honestly, I ping-pong (no pun intended) back and fourth on this one. This is essentially both a fad and a subculture of a subculture. Nerd culture has become popular and mainstream-ized in the 2000s, but it's also been watered down. It's hard to tell for the less informed of us who the REAL, original "nerd" are. Or are they "geeks?" Essentially, I'm saying that all those teens wearing skinny jeans and atari shirts are the clingers-on and when their interest in the "fad" side of the movements (which is one, don't forget, of reverence) dies down, what will be left is a subculture of a larger D&D and Caltech inspired nerd culture, and which I respect, and which will hopefully go on long before it ever dies.